The Outer Limits: From Outer Space to Spacy Progressives and Protestors

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Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson show. This is our Friday news roundup and we've got lots of news this week already.
It's it is actually Tuesday. Victor is on the East Coast.
And so we have

a little distance here in our conversation, which is good at times. We're going to be looking at the SpaceX capsule coming back with the astronauts in it, a district court judge telling Trump he can't deport Trendy Aragui killers, and Trump hitting the Houthis in the Red Sea, and then Israel back at war.
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Protect what you've earned before the fraud economy collapses completely. Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
Victor's the Martin and Neely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. You can find him at his website, victorhanson.com.
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So Victor, the SpaceX has their Dragon, their capsule that's called Dragon coming back and astronauts are on it. And it seems like it should be big news everywhere, all over the place, but we don't see that happening.
And I thought, I was wondering your thoughts on the... No, the left-wing media would rather beat this Khalil story to death, even though they're losing adherence, because most of the polls show that no one wants somebody in the United States on a student visa who was a prime organizer of this Columbia apartheid divest that was responsible for two break-ins into areas of Columbia and Barnard and committed violence, intimidated Jewish students, and without apology and with pride bragged on October 7th as the glorious day.
That's what Mr. Khalil did.
He knows it. Everybody knows it.
So they're dying on that hill. Meanwhile, there's a story that if this story had taken place four years ago, let's just imagine that, say in 2021, Biden has been inaugurated.
Elon Musk said to Tucker Carlson, I think, or it might have been Joe Wilkin, but I believe it was Tucker Carlson, that he voted for Joe Biden. We know that he voted for Hillary Clinton.
But I think at the time, Trump said, no, he didn't really. He just said that.
But whatever he did, my point is, if this was four years ago and there were astronauts that had not come home from the Trump administration, and maybe there were rumors circulating that Trump didn't want to risk it right before the election or something or in a campaign cycle, or he was mad at Elon Musk and didn't want to privilege him. Whatever the reason, and these are the rumors that are circulating, some of them coming home from the astronauts themselves.
They originate with them that they feel a great deal of gratitude for Musk and Trump, but not so much for Joe Biden. The left would be going crazy right now.
They would be talking as they had for a decade that Elon Musk is, I think, in Brian Williams terms, a Newton, a Renaissance person, a Da Vinci. And they would say, how could this be possible that the Boeing couldn't do it? NASA couldn't do it.
It sends up this rocket. It rescues these people.
The capsule had been inert. Now it's activated.
They're on their way home. This is a wonder and nothing, nothing.
In fact, as you saw on MSNBC with Simone Sanders and a couple of other people there, they were almost gleeful when that SpaceX rocket that was an experimental blew up. And they thought that was funny and neat.
These people are very ill. They really are.
And with the simultaneous attack on Tesla chargers, on keen Tesla cars, on burning dealerships, if this had been some kind of right wing group, we saw what happened on January 6th. They would be in prison right now for this.
They would be charged with RICO statutes of conspiracy. But the left is completely deranged.
It really is. And so I don't know what their feeling is.
I feel very awkward because I feel that given they've cheered on a prior spacex that blew up and laughed about it and then i i think rachel maddow and others said oh you better concentrate on business i don't know what their attitude is i hope they would not want this to fail given human life and the astronauts that are on it but they're capable of anything

right now they really are and um it's gonna it's it's it's very strange because their party is pulling now 28 to 32 percent depending on the poll and we all know it's because it's so nihilistic and radical. AOC, who's untenable as a candidate on a national level, is their highest ranking public figure.
And yet when you poll Democrats, they want to double down on the very positions that are making them unpopular. They don't think it's because they're too radical.
The Democratic Party, the majority, thinks they haven't done enough radicalism. So...
Yeah, it's getting really crazy with the Democrats. It seems to me that their parties must be headed to oblivion.
I just keep expecting somebody to start a new party for all of those Democrats that are disenchanted with their current party status. Everything is upside down.
I mean, I'm here in a hotel room in Palm Beach. I'm sorry about my voice.
It's been almost two weeks since I got the flu. And it doesn't look very good here, the curtain and everything, but it works.
But yesterday, Adam Schiff was a guest at my own Hoover Institution. I understand that we're a nonprofit and we have to be disinterested in terms of our guest, and he is our U.S.
Senator from California, but everything that he has done is antithetical to the mission statement of the Hoover Institution, of limited government, personal freedom, free market economy. But that campus, Stanford, and there's also protests going on, of course, for Mr.
Khalil. They've learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
They don't realize that that led to illegal encampments. That led to storming the president's office and ransacking it.
That led to defacing iconic historic sandstone colonnades at campus. And yet here we are again.
And the sheer hatred of Donald Trump has from people that I like and respect. It's just crazy.
It really is. Adam Schiff came to the Hoover Institution basically to say that Donald Trump was a tyrant, an autocrat, and powering oligarchy, and that we have to bring in more people like Mr.
Khalil. So all of our reference are gone.
They really are.

Nothing can be counted on because of this period of revolution and counter-revolution. Do you notice anything different on the Stanford campus with the protests this time around, since you have a different president at Stanford right now? Yes, there is.
And there's two things going on. Mr.
Levin is the former dean of the business school, and he had a reputation of being a normal liberal. And two, there are people who are aware that you can be deported if you're on a student visa and you're actively promoting State Department designated terrorist organizations.
That said, I think the university, I think they had walkouts in many of the classes. There's not going to be any consequences for that.
I would just say to all of these Stanford students that are not majoring in coding or computer engineering or physics or math, you're not going to get a job because not just the economy is changing. but when you've had four years of no SAT required until this year and no comparative rankings of

GPAs and 80 percent of you are getting A's, that has filtered out the Silicon Valley into employers at a sociology degree, a gender studies degree, even a history degree. These are not competitive degrees anymore.
They do not guarantee analytical thinking, computation, English spoken and oral prose, that nobody trusts that degree. And that's true of these other campuses.
And when you factor in as well that if Stanford can't charge its 55%, I don't know where they came up with that outrageous figure on individual grants or team grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. They're going to lose about $180 million.
If the Senate House reconciliation bill on taxing endowments should go through and they tax the income on endowments at about 15%, then they're going to lose totally about $400 million. And that would mean there'd be a, I mean, they have a $30 billion endowment.
I don't know why they need any federal monies, but they would lose half a billion dollars per year, and that might suggest that they don't need 15,000 administrative staff, one for each student. Yeah.
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So Victor, turning to our other subject, the big subject this week is Donald Trump deporting Trenda Arague mostly. So lots of killers and rapists and child molesters, et cetera, back into, I think he's sending them to El Salvador, if I'm not correct.
The guy has agreed to take them into that new-fashioned modern prison he has there. And so I was wondering your thoughts on this district court judge trying to stop that in midair? Well, there's hundreds of district judges

that were appointed by Barack Obama and Joe Biden. And remember, they were appointed and they were trained in law school in what we call critical legal theory.
And critical legal theory suggests that the laws, strict adherence to the laws empowers a particular privileged group of people, usually considered white, male, heterosexual, wealthy. And therefore, critical legal theory says that the entire jurisprudence as we know it is biased.
So therefore it is incumbent upon a judge to reinterpret the laws

so that they favor the people who are the victims in this Marxist binary,

a victimizer, a victim.

So in this way of thinking, there is a statute that says it is a criminal offense, not a civil offense, to enter the United States illegally. So these people have not only entered the United States illegally and not only have resided here illegally, but they have also been members of a very dangerous gang and it's got blood on its hands of American citizens.
So there should have been no problem just saying, you know what, we're not singling you out. You're just part of a criminal enterprise and you came under Joe Biden illegally.
So we're returning to you to your country of origin. So then what happens is these NGO, if I could use that word, non-government organizations, foundation-supplied, funded groups, so-called nonprofits, they get together and they have a list of all of the critical legal theory liberal justices.
And they know on their computers exactly what their rulings are on their scales of liberal jurisprudence. So then they pick that particular judge and then they sue and he puts a restraining order.
He knows it will be either overturned at the federal appellate court or it will be overturned at the Supreme Court. But that's not the point.
The point is that they can obstruct for three or four or five, six months. Then the left goes into hysterical mood and says that this is a constitutional crisis because the judge have had to stop this autocrat Donald Trump when they don't realize that if you read the Constitution and the powers reserved for the executive branch, there was never any idea that isolated judges could be cherry-picked to stop an elected president from following the law and enforcing the law.
But that's where we are. And so they're going to have to get another court, and then as soon as this is resolved, they'll go down to another federal court jurisdiction and they will sue again.

And that's how this system works now.

And the left counts on the idea that the foundations, the Network News, New York Times, even the Wall Street Journal now, to be frank, the Chicago Tribune, all of these outlets will then voice that Donald Trump is acting capriciously. He's he's over overstepping his legal prerogatives, et cetera.
And then that will help denigrate him and lose public support. They're looking for the critical mass.
In other words. They feel that if they can make Mr.
Khalil a civil liberties champion, fighting against genocide and not an advocate of the murders on October 7th and somebody whose organization that he defends and promotes said it wants to destroy Western civilization, they can make him a martyr and show that he was a victim of Trump vindictiveness, or if they can make this friend gang a victim, or if they can say that Canada hates our guts now, or Mexico is noble and is a victim of our aggression, or we want to invade Panama, Greenland, if they can do all of that, then they feel each is one little nick with a knife and they can bleed the Trump administration out. In opposition to that or as a remedy of that, they have to be very careful of Trump things.
They have to keep their eyes on the prizes. There's only about four or five things they need to do.
Number one, as they've done most of it, is close the border. That is a win-win situation.
Everybody likes that. They want the people here illegally deported.
If they can just keep on that, that'll be a big, significant gain. Number two is they want to cut government.
Everybody does, but they want to make sure that there's no zest, there's no relishing, there's no triumphalism, chauvinism, and laying people off. So they want a tragic approach to it.
They want Elon Musk and his team and the individual cabinet heads to say things like, I don't want to lay people off. I don't enjoy it.
But these people were hired with borrowed money, and many of them are political, and they're antithetical to good government. And presidents as diverse as Joe Biden and Barack Obama have warned us about corruption and waste and fraud and abuse in government.
So they need to do that. They need to get close to three, to balancing the budget.
No one's ever got close in a quarter of a century. And if they can bring some money in from the tariffs, bring some money on their new fast-track citizenship program, bring some money in by expanding the economy with deregulation.
And at the same time, they can cut this trillion dollars and get close. They won't balance the budget for two or three years if they're lucky.
But if they can get close, lower the interest rate, so we're not paying $3 billion a year in interest, then that's a big thing. And then finally, if he can bring some kind of moral clarity abroad and get a ceasefire with Ukraine and Russia that does not favor Putin, then he will be in the driver's seat.
All the rest of it doesn't matter. So what I'm getting at is the left is looking for irrelevancies.
I'll give you a couple. Joe Biden didn't know where he was.
We all know that. He used an auto pin.
Not he. Somebody was signing these orders.
But when Trump said we want to negate these orders because they were all signed by auto pin, well, that's just a losing proposition. You have to go to court and prove that he wasn't there, or he was just going to say that he was there, but he had so many.
That is a rabbit hole you don't want to go through. And the same thing about, we all understand the trolling and the art of the deal.
You don't want to talk about 51 state of Canada for any other reason, but one of the chiefest, no one in America wants Canada to be a 51st state. They really don't.
It's a left-wing political organization, the whole state. And it's state-run.
It's got a chip on its shoulder about America. It knows what it's doing.
We're much better just to smile and say, please, we don't want to have a tariff against you, but why are you running up $63 trillion? Why don't you just close the border? Why don't you spend 2% of your—that is a much healthier—same thing with Panama. We think we want to congratulate Panama.
They allowed American companies to reassume control of cargo ports at the entry and exit. We never were going to invade Panama.
We don't. We're a good friend of Panama, but we had to do something, unfortunately, to remind you that the Chinese have nefarious intent toward the...
And the same thing with Greenland. I think we've been very successful in pressuring a reassessment of Greenland.
We're glad that they had a plebiscite. They seem to be autonomous.
We're here to help if they want more U.S. bases or security guarantees.
But just cut out the talk about we're going to buy Greenland and all that stuff. Same thing with Panama, same thing with Canada.
So all of these controversial things are periphery. And you want to just kind of say, I didn't want to stage a counterrevolution.
They were the radicals.

I'm going back to normalcy. But then concentrate border, economy, deficits, debt, foreign policy, and you will be fine.

Because he's making progress in all those areas.

Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about the Middle East. Stay with us.
We'll be back. Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson show.
You can find Victor at X. His handle is at VD Hanson and then at it on Facebook at Hansen's Morning Cup.
So please come join him there if those are your social media outlets. So, Victor Trump has fired on the Houthis recently this weekend.
Sorry, bless you. And also Israel has renewed its war in Gaza.
The Hamas hasn't complied with ceasefire and giving back hostages as they agreed to. So no surprise that the war started up again, but I was wondering about your thoughts on these new events in the Middle East.
Well, it's very hard to force. I think we have one live hostage left, Americans.
There's some, I don't know what there are, 57 hostages, 56 still of the 260, but most people believe only half of them are alive. That's kind of macabre that they're hiding the corpses.
From the hostages that have been released lately, gosh, they were suffering from all sorts of pre-civilizational diseases, no sunlight, no diet, nothing. They were beaten, they were tortured.
All these people in Colombia and otherwise that are protesting on their behalf. I mean, if Israel was committing genocide, why are these known terrorists that have killed people treated better by the Israelis than average citizens are by Hamas? And it's not just Hamas.
I mean, as we've seen from the release of the hostages and the public spectacles that they undertake, they have public support from the average Gazan. So the situation is this.
There's about 25 hostages deep down from what we can tell from released hostages, deep down in subterranean tunnels, six or 700 miles of them all over. Maybe half of the tunnels are non-operative, but there's still digging us.
Some of the hostages are related. They dig all the time.
And most of the surface of Gaza, not most, but a considerable amount is rubble. So now the Israelis have to go find the second generation leaders of Hamas and target them through intelligence and then send in munitions and blow them up.
And it's going to be very hard to do that. It really is.
There's not that many hostages left. We don't know where they are.
And there's been so much damage to Gaza, it's going to be hard to find a way to inflict more pain on Hamas. And meanwhile, the United States is trying to free up the Red Sea, but nobody wants to use the Red Sea or the Suez Canal.
You'd think the Arab world would be cheering the United States on because Egypt's losing millions of dollars every day

with an enormous Suez. But that problem with the Houthis will not...
They have so many drones and missiles that they've stockpiled from Iran. We're trying to find them and blow them up, and they're operatives.
But all of these programs that Iran orchestrates, I guess that's the word, programs, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, you know, it's like an octopus. You cut off a tentacle, it grows back or something.
But nothing's going to stop until you focus on Iran. Now, he has put new sanctions on, oil sanctions.
That's going to really hurt them really big time. And maybe you should put a blockade on them.
But I think you should sanction countries that buy oil from Iran, like China, Russia, North Korea. Didn't Trump say that another action on the part of the Houthis would be considered an action by Iran? I thought he said that this week.
Yeah, he did. But we'll see what that means.
Does that mean he wants to hit their ports, their oil facilities, their military bases, or does he want to just go after the nuclear facilities? I wrote an article in the New Criteria last issue saying that he has to be careful because there's all these MAGA paradoxes. MAGA does not want to get involved overseas with optional military engagements, not after Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya.
But on the other hand, when he came into office after the Obama years, he had to restore deterrence. So he killed Baghdadi, Soleimani, the Wagner group.
So he's going to have to restore deterrence, and that's going to bother some of the MAGA people, that he's using force abroad in what they think is an optional manner. And I don't know to where he draws a line, but he's going to have to eliminate some of these enemies of the United States, but not do so gleefully or in a manner that's going to have us boots on the ground.
I think what they'll probably do if the Houthis start sending more missiles or Hezbollah reactivates is he will tighten up the sanctions on Iran, maybe have an embargo, maybe even hit some of its port facilities, but allow the Israelis to deal with their nuclear facilities. Iran is not in a good position right now.
They have all of their ethnic minorities, the Abir-Bajanis and the Kurds and others are in open defiance. Their infrastructure is shot.
They have no air defenses. Their missile arsenal is depleted and has been proven to be ineffective.

So they were kind of a paper tiger.

So was Hezbollah.

And Trump has about a year of open window before they start rearming. So he's in a good position to do whatever he wants.

Well, let's turn to Europe.

And Europeans have been making noises about,

well, we don't really like this Donald Trump administration, so we want to go independent of them. Maybe, maybe not.
But I thought this week a French official said that the United States under Donald Trump does not embody the ideals of the Statue of Liberty, and they would like to have their Statue of Liberty back. And I was wondering your thoughts on that.
Well, I don't know what to say. I think his name was Mr.
Glucksmann. He's a back-benching parliament member of the French government, left-wing, an-American party, many party he belongs to.
We do this occasionally with France. They were a good ally, but then they get on their

hind legs and start to criticize. Their basic problem is they think they're Socrates and we're

Roman legions, so that they dream, walk around in bare feet and robes and dream up all these

utopian things. And they point to America, this is what you got to do.
You know, Ukraine has

Thank you. They walk around in bare feet and robes and dream up all these utopian things.

And they point to America, this is what you've got to do. You know, Ukraine is going to be a EU, NATO, Western breadbasket and oil repository of the new Europe.

And we're going to bring all of our expertise in socialism and lgbtq and open borders and islamic populations into ukraine and this is going to work and oh by the way united states you better you better uh arm them and you better give them aid so i don't know why they make these statements because they have 500 million people people. Even with their socialist governments, they have a GDP that's, I don't know what it is, $15 or $16 trillion in aggregate.
They have 2,000 military jets, even in their disarmed state. They have more artillery platforms, more armored vehicles than do the Russians.
I think the men in uniform, even in their depleted state, are about five times larger than Russia's army. So all they have to do is they don't even need to talk to us.
Instead of just saying, we're going to take this, just say, you know what? We don't like you that much anymore. We want to be independent of you.
So we're going to have our huge, huge military industrial complex. And we're going to have a huge ground army.
And we're going to be on the threshold of Ukraine. And you won't negotiate for us in Ukraine.
We are. And we're going to arm it.
And we're going to put five or six hundred F-35s or F-16s, or maybe we'll have Swedish planes, or French mirages. I don't know.
But we don't need you. Just go do it instead of all this ankle biting.
That's our attitude. I think everybody's attitude about Mexico and Canada is all the same.
so yes Donald Trump order the deal yes Donald Trump

says things. Yes, he said he wanted to get out of NATO if the NATO members didn't arm.
Why should he protect? That's just irrelevant. What is relevant is Canada.
You're running $63 billion. And you know why you're doing it.
You're doing it through asymmetrical tariffs and that no one in the past said much. It's going up, not down.
Mr. Trudeau thought it was kind of funny not to patrol the border.
Okay, we understand that. You pay 1.36 in defense expenditure.
So we know that you're completely defenseless. You do not participate in a meaningful way with NATO.
And if Russia or China were to violate your airspace, as they did our airspace, the Chinese, you would turn to us. So all we're asking is don't force us to put tariffs on you like you put tariffs on us.

Our whole plan is reciprocity. You tariff up, we'll find the exact same tariff and put on you.
And we will defend you and cooperate when you spend 2%, as you promised. But you're not keeping your word and you're hostile to the United States.
That's all he has to say. No more 50 per state, nothing.
with Mexico, it says,

you know,

we know what we're doing. You're letting the Chinese come and assemble parts and some American companies to evade our free trade agreements that we've had in the past.
You're running not a 20, not a 50, not a 100, not 150, 175 billion dollar deficit. We have with you, you have a surplus.
It's the second largest, third largest deficit after Europe and China. But you're supposed to be our friends.
But we know what you're doing. We know that you've deliberately sent 12 million illegals under this non-conflictus, mentis, Biden.
We know they send $63 billion out of our economy. We know the people who send the money back are subsidized by our own welfare systems to free up cash.
We know your cartels import raw fentanyl from China, and they have particular industries that create and mask fentanyl-laced drugs. And they, between their smuggling charges and drugs, they suck out about $20 billion.
So you are sucking out of this country about $280 billion. Just stop it.
Just whatever your tariff is, our tariff will be. Whatever, we're going to, if you want to take $63 billion and deliberately send people here, deliberately so, so that they can send money back, some of it subsidized by our governments, then we're going to tax it 20%, 30%.
We don't want to, but you forced us to. And the same thing with Europe.

If you don't want to spend what you promised 11 years ago, what are we supposed to do?

And we've spent more money helping Ukraine on your border than all of you 32 NATO members.

That's close.

It's probably around $210 billion.

But we've spent more than all of you put together. And we're very distant.
All you have to do is step up. Step up and stop the rhetoric about the Statue of Liberty and how you're independent.
Just carry a club and keep quiet. We'll see.
We'll see, yeah. But Trump's got to, he has to accentuate that.
He's got to tell them very politely that he's not the aggressor. They are the aggressors.
They are the ones that are doing these things. We're not.
We're not running up big trade surpluses. We're not shorting NATO on our defense responsibilities.
We're not sending drugs into Mexico. We're not having Americans all over the world send remittances back here as they're on welfare in Europe or welfare.
It's they're doing it, but he's got to make that message. So, Victor, one more thing about Europe.
Michael Schellenberg, who has been great on the COVID virus, has uncovered one further thing, that the M16 in Britain knew COVID was from the lab in Wuhan from the get-go. And so, not a surprise, but what I was wondering, I was reading about that, is why did all of these governments, the UK, the United States, Canada, why did they cover up for the Chinese? I still don't understand that.
There's two or three reasons. There's two or three reasons.
The first is that they knew from the beginning, German intelligence knew UK, Department of Energy, CIA, FBI, they all knew it came. I mean, come on, Jon Stewart, not a great investigative mind, was laughing when he said, you mean, tell me that the first case was a scientist, the next guy is a mile away, and there's not a bat or a pangolin that ever got COVID before a human did.
And you're blaming it on them 100 miles away from a virology lab that was known and cited to be lax in its security. So number one is people like Anthony Fauci from the National Institute of Allergies, Infectious Diseases.
Francis Collins, the head of the National Institute of Health,

Peter Daszak, the British subject, the head of Echo Health, they knew since 2014 it was illegal,

illegal to engage in gain-of-function research on biology, especially with coronaviruses.

And they thought that was important. And maybe they had help from the DOD.
We see now that USAID had given $40 million to the lab, not just the $600,000. They claimed that was all they gave when they hid it by giving it to Peter Daszak.
So when that, if you look at their emails, even the ones that are redacted, they were paranoid. Fauci, Collins, Peter Daszak, because they knew what they had done.
If you think about it existentially, 100 million people may have died. One million Americans got it.
Somewhere around 100,000 people had sequela. They were sick from long COVID, and some of them were still maimed.
I had it twice. I can tell you that six months in a year, I had long COVID on two occasions.
It was not fun. It was really a neurological disease.
I ended up with glaucoma. I ended up with deafness.
And they knew that. They knew that they had had a role in that.
And they wanted to keep that quiet. That was number one.
Number two, this all took place during the Trump administration. So anybody who questioned what Fauci and Birx and Collins were saying.
The vaccinations, they were not going to keep you safe. They were not going to prevent you from infecting somebody.
But if you said that, you were in trouble. Social distancing, there was no scientific support for that.
And for masks, other than close proximity indoors, there was no reason to wear them outdoors. And they also realized that, in addition to that, that the quarantine was not justified.
And it did enormous damage. We all know that now.
But they tied all this in with Trump. So Trump did it.
Trump did it. Trump did it.
Trump did it. So it was a club to hit Trump over the head with.
And then third, there were so many NGOs, universities, international globalists, WHO, UN types, and especially corporate interests with business in China, that they did not want to allow their partner, economic, financial, cultural, social, political partner, to be stigmatized as killing 100 million people. So they wanted to say it was just an accident, even though that...
I wrote an article one day after I learned that China had stopped all flights from Wuhan to any city, any city in China, but they had allowed international flights from Wuhan to Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York, and there might have been over a million people that left Wuhan in the ensuing months before we stopped the travel ban, which Trump was damned for. So that was what it was.
It was part of a lie, a series of lies that the Biden people and the Obama-Clinton did. And they knew they were lying, and now they say they were lying, and they're not apologetic.
And that was one big lie. The second big lie was that Joe Biden was hell.
He wasn't. He was always mentally compromised.
Now we're getting books out by left-wing media people that say there was a conspiracy to hide that. I went on a major television and said, I shouldn't have used the

adjective reptilian, but they got very angry at me. And when I said he was not in control of his

faculties, I wrote that. I got hate mail and said, you're ageist, you're mean.
They were the ones that

were mean. They foisted this waxen veneer or this functionary on us as a mask of a hard left agenda that if they didn't have that veneer, it would not have been implemented the way it was.
That was the second lie. The third lie was the collusion.
They knew from the beginning that Donald Trump was not working with Vladimir Putin. So they hired through three paywalls the campaign, Christopher Steele, he half James Bond mishmash, half sex stories about urination in a hotel room, and a third Russian disinformation.
And they mixed it all up. And then the checks came from Hillary to the DNC to Perkins Coie to Fusion GPS to Christopher Steele.
And he was hired as an informant for the FBI. And that dossier was used to try to destroy Donald Trump in the campaign.
And then for his first year and a half to through the Mueller investigation to derail him. And it indirectly led to his impeachment.
That was the third great lie after Biden-Wuhan. And then there was the fourth lie, the laptop lie.
They knew from the very beginning it was an FBI control. It had been authenticated.
Christopher Wray knew it. FBI kept quiet about it.
Anthony Blinken was worried that it was so lurid, so pornographic, so full of drug use and so full of concrete illusions about Joe Biden. Mr.
Big, Mr. 10 percent, that Donald Trump would destroy him in that October 23rd, 2020 debate.
So Blinken came up with the idea. He was working for Biden.
Hey, Mike Morale, you used to be the head of the CIA. Can you secretly get the old bunch together? You know, the perjurer John Brennan, former CIA, the crazy guy Mike Hayden that compares Trump to Hitler and Auschwitz, the crazy John Brennan, the other perjurer, head of National, and get our Leon Panetta, who hates Trump.
Get them all together, and then they'll round up some lesser functionaries. Just word it really carefully.
Don't use the word disinformation. Use the word information.
Then say, has all the hallmarks of. So we say that this laptop has all the hallmarks of a Russian information campaign.
And then we can have plausible deniability, because we know it's false. It's true.
It's an authentic laptop. But launch it right before the debate so Joe can go on TV and then cite 51 and lie his head off and refute Trump and win the election.
And that's what they did. Does anybody believe now in retrospect that the Wuhan lab had nothing to do with the origins of COVID? Does anybody believe that a pangolin or bat in a wet market caused that? No, no one does.
Does anybody believe that Hunter's laptop was authentic and a product of Russian inauthentic and was cooked up in the Kremlin? No, no one believes that. Does anybody believe that Christopher Steele had accurate information in his dossier? No, no one believes that.
No one believes that Biden was hailed. No one believes the, so no one believes the virology lab was not the source of COVID.
No one believes the lies about Russian collusion or laptop disinformation. There was a fifth lie.
And that was, we don't know what happened to the border, but it's secure. And as far as the 10 to 15,000 people coming across, well, it's because we don't have comprehensive immigration reform.
That's the reason. And we're not going to whip people like the Border Patrol does.
And we're not going to build a fence. And we're going to bring back catch and release.
We'll let people apply for refugee status. Once they get here, we'll fly them in at night on an app.

Each can apply for immunity from diplomatic audit.

And we just can't close the border.

Now we know that was a complete lie.

Complete lie.

So there were five big lies that the Biden administration oversaw.

And now what I'm getting at, no one wants to defend them now. I can't find anybody who says, well, wait a minute, Victor, there's good evidence that that Wuhan lab we were right all along.
It had nothing to do with it, that pangolin. Or, hey, Victor, Joe Biden is sharp as a tack, fit as a fiddle.

I just saw him.

He was right on top of things.

Or, I looked at the stuff on the laptop, that lurid stuff, that was all cooked up.

Or, that dossier, boy, it was really authentic.

It was factual.

Or, well, they had nothing to do, they didn't want to open the border.

It was just Trump's fault. He didn't give a comprehensive immigration.
So we know that they've all been reputed. Trump came in and like, what, two weeks, the border was closed.
And now we get a book every week about how Joe Biden was completely unfit to be president. There was a conspiracy to hide that.

Yeah. And I think what also came of all of this was that everybody learned to trust various sources on social media and that the regular news was just following up on the lies that the administration was telling.
I think we all learned that from the entire situation, that you had to start to look for different outlets for news, and that happened to be on social media. So social media proved itself.
Yeah, I think that's true. If you look at the commonalities, so I mentioned those five lies that were foisted on us, they all had commonalities.
Number one, no one was ever prosecuted for lying or anything. And a lot of them involved breaking the law.
Number two, none of them ever apologized. Number three, none of them ever tried to refute that they were lying or to bring in evidence that they were not lying.
They never did. They didn't even defend themselves.
Number four, the media bought every one of those lies. CBS, NBC, MSNBC, all the print media, every one of them.
And they damned anybody who objected. The only outlet was social media.
Number five is, in some ways, the Biden administration was involved in all of them. All of them.
And no one ever has taken responsibility for that, about the border, the disinformation on the laptop. But Blinken, nothing ever happened to Blinken.
He should have been censored, or he should have never been, if they had known it, they should never been confirmed for Secretary of State for what he did. That affected a land, there was a conservative organization that suggested that the laptop alone changed the course of the 2020 election, had people known the truth about it, that it was authentic and it was cooked up the idea that it was a lie and that Christopher Steele changed things.

But Biden had his hands in all of those things.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break

and then come back and talk a little bit about Fannie Willis,

or Fannie Willis, is back in the news today.

So stay with us. We'll be right back.
Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson show. So Victor Fannie Willis has a judge has finally decided that she had not been truthful and disclosed evidence about Nathan Wade with the defense and that she needs to pay a fine of $54,000.
And I was wondering your thoughts on the new Fannie Willis update.

Well, Fannie Willis' whole career was based on the fact that as Fulton County District Attorney,

she could do anything she wanted because she was elected by hard-left people, and she was hard-left.

And as long as she kept saying she was a proud black woman and she was going to speak truth to power and go after Donald Trump, she was elected. That was the whole point.
And it all started to fall apart when she got tied up with Nathan Wade, who was completely incompetent. He had no experience in that type of prosecution.
He was paid, I guess, $700,000. The two of them went on junkets with his bloated salary.
And then in a racist fashion, when they were caught, she claimed that black people do not have to keep receipts that they deal in cash, which I know a lot of black people, their commercial values are no different than anybody else. They use cash to the same or less than anybody else.
So that was all a racist lie that she promulgated. And then she was having an affair with him.
Then she sent him on November 15th, excuse me, November 18th of 2022, the White House, where he billed the government, I guess, for his expertise to fill them in on what she was doing, because they wanted to know, because that same day they had appointed Jack Smith as a federal prosecutor. And that same day, Michael Colangelo had left the DOJ to work with Alvin Bragg and apprise him of the work that he had done previously for Latita James.
So all of those four indictments were connected. And she just didn't, when people wanted some information about the communication she had, she just said, screw you, I'm not going to show you.
And of course, they finally fined her for that. And that shows you that she knew she was going to be fined, and she either thought it was going to help her politically, or it wouldn't be that much, or it was not going to be as bad as releasing files that might indicate more collusion.

Well, then let's turn to the Secret Service detail for Ashley and Hunter Biden.

Both of those have been pulled off.

I'm not sure why they needed the detail that they had.

It seems like they had 13 and 18 Secret Service agents with them all the way up until yesterday and it's Tuesday today. So I was wondering your thoughts on that.
Usually the President's children are given I think five or six months honeymoon so that when they get back if somebody who didn't like their father tries to threaten them but not beyond that. So it was logical that his term of free secret service agents would end.
What was the catalyst was that he had filed a lawsuit blaming people who were so-called persecuting him, and about the laptop, especially the owner, said that he had libeled him and that the laptop was inauthentic. Although he never really said that.
You remember what he said? They said, well, are you saying it's inauthentic? And he said, I haven't said. Well, wait a minute.
You're saying that he's wrong because he says it is authentic. So you must believe it's fake.
You said it, I didn't. That kind of stuff.
And then he ran out of money because he was no longer able to grift because his father was no longer president. So he's now in South Africa where his wife apparently grew up with all the secret service.
And I think a lot of people are angry because he tried to destroy this poor guy who was a service person who had a contract that says, if you abandon a piece of equipment with me and I have put my labor into it, then it's mine after a certain date. And so he went after that person, but now he has no money.
So he just skipped. He didn't want to be cross-examined.
That was his biggest problem because he would have to say things that were not true under oath. So he just fled to South Africa and said, you know, I can't, he's in a fetal position.
Hunter did. He'd just go.
But he took a secret service date. And Ashley Biden, I guess, because she had the diary business, remember,

where she wrote in her diary that she thought she was a little bit too old and may have been harmed by showering with her father, Joe Biden.

And then that was abandoned by her in a hotel, a rental. And then somebody found it, the next occupant, and tried to peddle it.
And at one time, James O'Keefe looked at it, but was not interested for, I guess, a reason. But the FBI rousted him out at, what, three in the morning in his underwear.
So the Biden family are a train wreck, all of them. And And I think Trump is just saying we're not going to pay for this anymore.
And I don't think they need to. And there's another thing they're not going to pay for anymore, and that is the Voice of America staff has been asked to hand in or to go on leave for a while.
So they're going to make some big changes at the Voice of America, which I'm pretty happy about. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like the BBC.
It started out as a very wonderful organization that brought culture, movies, literature, film. I've done some things for it in the past, but it's not now.
It's run by left-wing people who feel that they can appeal most to people abroad by trashing the United States. And it brings up, I think you're going to see the whole, I mean, George Will, who's a fanatic never-Trumper, even admitted that he thinks they should cut the PBS and the NPR budgets.

I think 50 or 60 percent of their budgets are from private organizations, Rockefeller Foundation, Tides Foundation, all of these multi-billion dollar foundations. So the amount of money they'll get from government is probably very small now, probably 10 or 20 or 30 percent, and they should cut it.

And then let all these left-wing organizations that run it... And it's probably very small now, probably 10 or 20 or 30 percent.
And they should cut it.

And then let all these left-wing organizations that run it.

I hadn't listened to it in years.

And the other day I was driving, I just turned on NPR. And I just said to myself, I'll just adjudicate the content of the news and the shows that every one of them was left-wing.

Every one of them.

And I've been on there before, and it's very difficult to go on. I think I mentioned once on the air that they asked me during the Trump years to comment on the border, and the argument was that he was creating cages to put children in and separate from their parents.
And I tried politely to show that those facilities were created by Barack Obama and that this surge was deliberate to embarrass Trump. The person disagreed, but the host cut me off and said, thank you.
And then the person interviewed me, just went on a rampage about how wrong I was, which is really unprofessional to attack a guest after he's off the air. So I told when they called and kind of gave me an apology.
I said, I'll never I will never, ever be on NPR again. I haven't since.
They're kind of like the New York Times when they anybody from the New York Times or the Washington Post or NPR, PBS calls you. If you're a conservative person, do not cooperate with them because what they want to do is to speak to you on the phone, record it, and then cut and paste maybe eight words.

And they say things like this.

I'll just make it hypothetical.

Are you a little worried about the Trump tariffs?

And if you say, not really, I just think we have to be more focused how we word it,

that's all you say.

Then they will have a long article, and they'll say,

conservative observer Victor Hansen of the conservative Hoover Institution says he's

very worried about Trump's wording. That's what they'll say.
Or they'll say, Hansen blast Trump.

That's what they will do. And it won't matter who it is.
They'll all do that. And they'll be

very nice to New Yorker. I had the same experience.
So I don't talk to any of them. And I would advise

no conservative to do that because they're not interested in actually finding an oppositional

Thank you. to New York where I had the same experience.
So I don't talk to any of them. And I would advise no conservative to do that because they're not interested in actually finding an oppositional point of view.
They're just trying to get some conservative who they can use as a foil against Trump or somebody. Well, Victor, the last topic today is Harvard has signed, well, has decided, I guess I should say, to give free tuition to students who families earn less than $200,000.
And for those that earn less than $100,000, they're going to offer housing and health services for them as well. Is this some sort of new leaf or what's going on with Harvard? Well, they have $50 billion endowment, you know, so they have plenty of money and I think they're under so much criticism from everybody that they're trying to show that they're more egalitarian.
But the real story is that it's about $200,000 for books, room and board, and tuition at Harvard. And if you come from a state like New York or California, where the income tax is 12%, 13%, and you add that to the 38% federal tax and then the Obamacare.
So you really do lose half your salary if you're in that income bracket that sends your kids to Harvard or Yale or Stanford. So basically $200,000 means you have to allot $400,000 per student per year of your gross income.
The government won't take half, and then you'll need $200 net to give to Harvard or Stanford for the whole package. Tuition alone is a quarter million dollars, but it's probably $500,000, $600,000, $700,000 for four years when you do the rent and the food and the health care, all the rest.
So nobody really can go there unless they're on a scholarship, unless they're very, very wealthy. The person that gets really hurt is the middle class kids.
Maybe that's what they're worried about. But the poor have been on complete scholarships and the very wealthy are exempt because of their parents' income.
It's vast. But these places do not try to get people geographically or economically or racially diverse.
So in the case of Stanford, if they really wanted to do something like that, they would say, look, white males are about 35% of the population. And we'd like to get white males from Arkansas or Montana or Wyoming, not just the children of the vicosal elite.
And we want them to represent their numbers and demographics, but they don't do that. They only have 9% white males that have been led into STEM for the last three or four years, and they're not politically diverse.
They all talk about diversity, but you look at the, there's been a new study out by the Pew polling organization that I was reading not long ago, and it pretty much confirms that 75 to 90 percent of all the faculties at these universities are Democrats and left-wing. They have no interest in being diverse at all.
They don't want their students to diverse. So you can see what's happening.
These students come to these universities, and all of the classes are, almost all of them them a 90 percent are left-wing and they're ideological and the students are brainwashed and then it's sort of like being in a political party or being a part of the nomenclature of the soviet union and and you just they turn them out and they're on student law and student loans and when they come out, if they have a degree in anything other than science or math or engineering, it's worthless. I would imagine that many of the students at Columbia that you see protesting are minoring or majoring in disciplines that have no chance of making more than $50,000 a year.
And the money, the disposable income from those salaries wouldn't even pay back their student loans. And so that's another thing that we're talking about.
This $1.7 trillion of loans mostly went to people that were middle class or upper middle class that majored in fields that have no renumerate value and cannot pay that back. So it makes people very frustrated and angry, I suppose.
But somewhere the university was liable or culpable. Wouldn't it be nice if you were going to college and when you were admitted, then you got a call or a Zoom conference with the support staff and said, this is going to cost you $700,000 or $800,000 for room board tuition for four years or five years, the average it takes to graduate.
And these are the majors that we offer. And these are the average income that these majors usually garner when upon graduation.
This is the amount of money that you borrowed. This is the amount of interest that's charged on those loans.
This is the amount of money you will need upon graduation to service those loans. And these are what you can expect to be paid given the field that you're majoring in.
And that would be very honest to do that. If you buy a car, they basically say that to you.
Yeah. Well, last thing then about universities, there's a new commentator, Christopher Rim, R-I-M, and he's showing that the admissions, you were saying, well, somebody's responsible for bringing in all these students that are studies students, etc.
But he was talking about how they purposely target, and he was referencing specifically Columbia University, target radicals to bring them into their university. So all of the trouble on the Columbia campus is self-induced, is what Christopher Rim was saying.
And I thought that was very insightful.

And he gives the case example of, well, they ask you questions to talk about how you might learn or contribute to Columbia's diverse and collaborative community. All key words for, tell us just how DEI you are.
Oh, I mean, the faculty, they're starting to find that they're unconstitutional from some court rulings, but to apply for a faculty position, you basically had to have a 1950s loyalty oath, but your loyalty was not the United States. It was to DEI.
So what have you done in your past to promote diversity, equity, inclusion? If you just left that blank or you didn't have a very impressive, they were not going to hire you. The same thing is true about students.
People forget that all of the admissions committees at universities are made of faculty members. And they're all left wing.
The larger question is why are they so left wing? Part of it is they spent too much of their lives. They've never been in the real private sector.
I mean, a graduate student is basically an undergraduate who at 21 went to graduate school. And then for the next five years at 26 was now a decade on the campus with summers off left wing people, and then they went out and tried to get a job.
So one of the things I noticed when I was 18 is all my professors had never had a job outside of academia, ever, ever. And so they were just completely insulated from market realities because they had lifelong tenure and they usually had campus housing and it was a wonderful position.
They were around young people and they were all looked up to. They had titles.
They really took themselves very seriously, too seriously. So I think that's all going to end because the country doesn't want to pay for it.
A recent poll asked them, what is your opinion of the Ivy League? And for the first time, more Americans had a negative idea, negative appraisal of the Ivy League. And the second question was, do you think an Ivy League education makes you a better worker? Ten% said yes.
So, and as I said before, when I talk to overseer groups for the Hoover Institution, Stanford alumni, many of them, they all say that what they're most worried about, this is what Mark Andreessen, the entrepreneur, was saying, that when they hire a Stanford graduate or a person from that type of school, they have an attitude that's complaining. They're used to being coddled.
They feel they're brilliant. They're always looking to be oppressed, and they don't like the corporation for which they're working.
So there you have it. Well, Elon Musk was very unpopular, but he proved at Twitter that you could run an effective company by having 20% of the workforce come in and work.
And Jamie Dimon is saying the same thing. So it's, I don't know.
I have a bachelor's degree and a PhD, and I was always a big adherent of academia. That it was taught, and I taught a lot of minority and young kids that didn't have access to college, Western Civ and literature and things like that.
But looking back at 71, maybe I'm talking as if I still have the flu and I'm depressed, but I look at my life and I see that on the ledger that the academic world was on the negative side of the ledger. It did more damage than it did good to students, to the economy, to people in general.
And to the degree that we have a divisive population where people identify by their tribe and not as Americans in the ecumenical fashion, to the degree that we have this strong anti-Americanism in the country, to the degree we have all of these ideas that are very pernicious,

like LGBTQ biological men and women's sports or critical legal theory or critical race theory or the ideologies that drive BLM or our attitude toward home. They all came out of the university.
All of them did. all right Victor Victor, we are at the end of our show.
I'd like to thank our audience for joining us today, for choosing to join us. And thank you for all the wisdom on all the news of the week.
I hope it went all right. I was using a different type of microphone in a kind of gloomy hotel room, and I still have some traces of this flu, but we finished.
Yes, we did. So thanks to everybody.
This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hanson, and we're signing off. Thank you, everybody.
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